Re: Accessible UML drawing tools
- From: Michael Whapples <mwhapples@xxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 13:41:38 +0100
Hello,
I am in the same situation wanting a tool to allow me to draw UML
diagrams for sighted people, and when I heard of Accessible UML I was
hopeful too, but yes it is only review previously generated UML
diagrams.
I do though have something which might be of interest. If you use
eclipse, it seems like one of the plugins from eclipse (I think as part
of the europa stuff) can produce UML and seems to be possible to use.
The plugin you need to find is the uml2tools plugins. When creating uml
diagrams with it, there is the .uml file and other ones for each
particular diagram type (eg. .umlclass_diagram for a class diagram). I
am not fully sure of what the diagram files are for as the .uml file is
enough to initialise the diagram files. For this you would edit the .uml
file, and the plugin provides a editor for this, which presents elements
in a tree view and then you can edit the element properties by using the
context menu (accessed with the context key, or probably right click)
and selecting show properties. When you have finished it, you can
produce an image output (probably one of the most difficult parts for
accessibility) by going to the diagram file in the project explorer and
pressing enter, then going into the context menu and selecting the file
menu there and save as image. Various formats are supported, eg. gif,
bmp, svg, etc.
There are a few things that might be improved for accessibility, or even
improved generally in this, (eg. may be save as image should be in the
context menu of the diagram file in the project explorer. I also have
found on linux certain navigations aren't as good as they could be and
could be improved by a shortcut key) but in the main it looks
promising.
The other problem is that I think it is quite new and documentation
seems to be lacking, in what I believe is the documentation part of the
plugin, the only file which looked like it might yield some useful
information (according to file name) when opened simply read "TBD". I
haven't found anything which could really be called documentation
online. Hopefully this situation may improve in time as well.
Either searching for it online will reveal its website, but it can also
be found in the repositories in the software update part of eclipse (it
was one of the pre-specified repositories included with eclipse when I
downloaded it (version 3.3.2, I don't know about other versions)). If
you want more details about it, I will do what I can to help.
Michael Whapples
On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 02:24 -0400, FreeLists Mailing List Manager wrote:
> From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Alexandre_Alves_T=F4co?=
> <alexandretoco@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Accessible UML drawing tools
> Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 06:52:09 -0300
>
> Hi friends, maybe I missed some thing... I understood that there
> is a
> tool in wich a blind could draw a uml diagram and save it in a way
> that it
> could be imported to tools comonly used by sighted people to design
> uml
> diagrams.
> I downloaded accessible uml. But it only allowed-me to review a
> previous
> generated uml diagram.
> Is there a tool that allow a blind people to draw uml?
>
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